If you buy a PowerMac G5, get the cheapest one. The processors aren't a big deal. Spend $50 to upgrade the graphics, and spend $300 to get a gig of RAM. DO NOT buy a display through the site. They are sexy, but $1000 is just insane. A third party monitor will work just fine; you can buy two flat screen monitors and still save $400. You will be able to get a great system for about $1800, without a monitor(you can just use the one from your PC if you want). Don't worry about the dual processor systems. They are nice, but they are overkill. In school I use a 1.6Gig single processor, and it is incredibly powerful. The cheapest on the Apple site is 1.8 single. So you don't need to spend a fortune. Just don't be cheap on the RAM. 1GB minimum. You can get away with the stock graphics card, but I recommend at least the 9600(only $50 more).
Like someone else said, try for the student discount. Speaking of student discounts, Studica.com sells Avid Xpress Pro(the best editing program you can get outside of a post-production house) for $300. It's a hard program, but if you used FCP, you will have no problem with it. Or hell, just stick with FCP is that's what you like. It's not as good, but the differences are pretty small.
AbsoluteDestiny wrote:THe main thing avisynth does is frameserve footage (such as dvd mpeg2) into editing programs and make it useable. All mac editing software will work with DV which is lossy and takes up a much more space and with only 40 gig to play with that means not a great deal of video footage.
One thing professional editors do to save drive space is edit in low quality. I can fit at least 30 hours on an 80GB hard drive. Then, when you are done with the editing, simply bump it up to high-res. You don't need high-res footage to make your sequence. You just recapture it after you are done(of course, this only applies if the footage has timecode).
I've been looking heavily into getting a Mac in these last few weeks and reading nonstop, so if you have any questions, I probably know the answer to it, so ask away.
